DOWSING ANEMONE WITH COPPER TONGUE

I must admit that being album of the year in progarchives was the the main reason that drove me to Kayo Dot. I am not into this "kind of music", it is too avant garde for my ears but I enjoy some of the elements that this record offers. And it offers them poorly. The first time I listened to it, it was a disaster. I thought to myself "this was terrible but maybe you are not ready". So I left it for some months.

Now after a couple of spins, I feel that I am ready to say that this is still a poor effort. I don't know if this is music of the future. It surely has a lot of elements of music of the past. Post-rock, psychedelic sounds, strange scales, some jazz and a bit of doom metal (someone succesfully mentioned Type O Negative - I agree to that). Well we all have our influences but we have to go somewhere with them, do we? So here is the main controversy: Do they create music or do they experiment beyond that? I believe that the latter is the case here. And I prefer to review music, progressive but still music. Somewhere in the way they lost it or they lost me.

There are some fine moments that I can go along with in this record, there are some nice ideas and there are some emotions floating around. But still the result is not complete. So I cannot salute this "new wave of progressive music". Not yet. Maybe it needs a few more years, maybe we will forget it cause there are so many different, better, enjoyable ways to experiment with music. Before some fans of this start to accuse me of "I don't know what", let me just say that reviews are instant and tend to capture the ideas of the reviewer at the moment. And we don't know how these ideas will transform in the future. And that works both ways.

As for this record, I am sure that I cannot go through the whole process of listen it again, since I have ZERO tolerance for the quite annoying 12.5 minutes of "... On limpid form" : "Doom riff going nowhere - noises of madness".

One star is too cruel. 2 or 3 stars is the dilemma. Well the 2 stars descibes it better: "Collectors/Fans only".